Tag Archives: christmas

The Loop / Golf Digest — “Wonderful Christmastime” is the worst of Christmas songs, but it makes up for it by also being the worst of all songs, the worst song ever written by a human, Beatle or otherwise, the worst melody, the worst synthesizer, the worst production, the worst Wings song, the worst pronunciation of the word “here,” the worst lyrics, the worst scent. I have never seen the cover of the 45, but I bet it f**ing sucks. “Wonderful Christmastime” is the most terrible song ever written by anyone, or anything, ever, including robots and gorillas and Puff Daddy and Courtney Love. No one likes “Wonderful Christmastime.” No one. Paul McCartney hates it. All of Paul McCartney’s wives hate it. Santa thinks it’s a joke. God is like, ” I did not bestow upon you the Breath of Life to dishonor me with this unMely dreck,” and I imagine He’s not real happy about “Ebony and Ivory” either.

On Parenting at the Washington Post — Generally speaking, Christmas trees arrive in one of two ways: 1. You pack a saw and rope and drive to a Cut Your Own Tree Farm, which makes you feel like a beefy, whiskey-swilling, red-bearded lumberjack army-crawling through dirt and pine needles and probably fire ants until you ask a 19-year-old to help you tie it to the top of your Honda Odyssey; or 2. You go to the attic and retrieve the Giant Box of Fake Christmas tree, which you purchased some years ago from, hypothetically speaking, a Kmart in east-central Indiana.

My family went with Option B. As I was fortunate enough to have both a Christmas-loving family and unusually tall ceilings, our fake tree was a goliath, a monstrous army-grade artificial Douglas fir Fraser pine (okay, I have no idea what it really was, I slept through college horticulture) that endured for nearly a decade. It was rich, plush and lifelike, even if it smelled less like evocative forest pine and more like the inside of a Kmart in east-central Indiana.

GateHouse — So I’m in a Secret Santa thing here in the office, and like so many things about Christmas, it’s making me reach for the wine bottle well before my usual 10 a.m. start time, because I have now received no gift from my Secret Santa for the SECOND CONSECUTIVE DAY. This keeps up, I’m gonna start throwing elves.

Let me back up: No, I don’t hate Christmas, except the shopping and parking and most of the music and the way it makes me engage in the near-impossible task of actually absorbing more debt into my increasingly hilarious floral arrangement of credit cards (somewhere in Visa Fortress, I’m fairly well convinced that a group of doughy shareholders does the “Beat It” dance every time they see my name).

And yes, I know it’s better to give that receive, thank you very much, hippie Democrats, Charlie Brown and the nagging voice in my head that keeps me awake every single night.

GateHouse — IMPORTANT CARTOON-AND-BLACK PRESIDENT ALERT: In addition to being a Muslim Kenyan chain-smoking Bolshevik Hitler-loving child-indoctrinating reality-TV-contestant-inviting Will.I.Am fan, Barack Obama hates Charlie Brown. This is actually no great shakes because most of the “Peanuts” kids hate Charlie Brown, but Obama hates Charlie Brown in a way that efficiently connotes his hatred of America as well. (If America wanted to kick the football Obama would be all like, “Whiff, suckers,” and then throw mayonaise on the Little Red-Haired Girl.)

And I have proof, because of Facebook, and Tennessee, in that order.

Last week’s airing of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” the special that’s been beloved for decades despite being about 25 solid minutes of the emotional abuse of a child, was pre-empted on the television machine by Herr President Omuslim’s speech about his strategy for the war in Afghanistan, or some such nonsense you could read about on the crawl under the Tiger-sexting stuff anyway.

GateHouse – There are a lot of things wrong with Santa Claus — the tobacco addiction, the repeated breaking and entering, the vanishing for 364 consecutive days without explanation — but to that long and deplorable list ABC News has added the following: Santa Claus may be sending the wrong body message to children.

Indeed, in a video clip posted this week on abcnews.com, there stands a blow-dried twerp in a shiny suit, arguing with a disgustingly faked sense of concern that “the big belly will send a bad message to kids,” specifically the millions upon millions of kids who look at Santa Claus not as a magical elf who brings free presents every year, but as the standard for sheer physical magnificence and the primary reason they keep going to gym class every week.

GateHouse — If you are running out of gift ideas and time this Christmas season — and, let’s be honest, you are, I can see the cold desperation in your eyes — boy, do I have good news for you. But I must warn you that it’s gonna hinge a little bit on what your definition of “good news” is; I’m being honest when I say that when you buy someone a casket for Christmas and watch them unwrap it, it’s going to make things more than a little weird around the old family hearth for a good 15 minutes or so. (Also, it’s gonna take a ridiculous amount of wrapping paper; you may want to hit the Sam’s Club. Try and find a good hiding place for it, too: You can’t just hide a casket under the bed. Well, you can, but you need a super-tall bed, and still it would probably freak the bejesus out of the kids.)